The Friends of Czech Heritage: keeping you informed about our activities

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Please note that the working holidays are booked by emailing the Friends' Chairman on and are paid for by Paypal. The one-off events such as lectures and concert are fully bookable on the website, which is done by clicking here.

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Under Rudolf II Prague again became the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Following the example of his Habsburg ancestors, he assembled an exceptional collection of works of art for which the imperial palace on the Hradčany was adapted. He patronised...

The Friends held two very productive working parties at Červený Dvůr in South Bohemia at the end of May and beginning of June. The numbers were small but sometimes this can be an advantage, especially when doing semi-skilled tasks, as we were. The project was centred around the reconstruction of the two gatehouses, which formerly guarded the main c...

The first stop was the Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty, where we first viewed the Chapel with its remarkably intact Norman architecture. After coffee sitting outside the Hundred Men’s Hall the group enjoyed a tour of the Great Hall of the Hospital led by Barbara Peacock, one of the founders of The Friends. Lunch was at The Bell ...

Tuesday 3rd December 2019 at 6.30pm in the Embassy of the Czech Republic, 26-30 Kensington Palace Gardens, London W8 4QY In his talk, Dr Lorman will explore how Slovak culture was initially characterised by its rural quality and alienation from the beginnings of mass industrialisation and urbanisation in Hungary (exemplified by the 1896 millennial ...

Under Rudolf II Prague again became the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Following the example of his Habsburg ancestors, he assembled an exceptional collection of works of art for which the imperial palace on the Hradčany was adapted. He patronised painters, sculptors, goldsmiths who flocked to Prague, and also men of learning including Tycho Bra...

Sir Jonathan Marsden gave a talk at the Embassy of the Czech Republic on Tuesday 14th May 2019 , entertaining the guests with stories from behind the scenes of the Royal Sculpture Collection. He presented some of the lessons learned from working on a catalogue raisonné of European sculpture in the Royal Collection to be published ...

FRIENDS' LECTURE: BRITAIN AND BOHEMIA IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY On 5th March 2019 Dr. Mark Whelan, an historian of late medieval and early modern Germany and Central Europe who is currently working at King’s College, London, gave a lecture explaining how and why the English kings and senior clerics became involved in the early-fifteenth-century stru...

The project that we undertook at the Château of Vizovice in the week 8 - 15 September consisted of taking down an unstable brick boundary wall in the park, which had been rebuilt before the Velvet Revolution. It was set on a stone base, which had also collapsed in places. We cleaned all the bricks ready for reuse and rebuilt sections of the stone b...

A CELEBRATION OF CZECHOSLOVAK CULTURE IN WARTIME BRITAIN On 9th October 2018 Dr. Jana Burešová of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies at the University of London gave a talk at the Czech Embassy on the ways in which both Czech and German-speaking exiles from Czechoslovakia during the Second World War acted to promote knowledge...

On 8th January 2019 the art historian Caroline Cannon-Brookes gave a fascinating lecture in the Czech Embassy, London, about the life of Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand II (1529- 1595) and the collections amassed by him. Born the second son of the future Emperor Ferdinand I and Anne of Bohemia, he was Regent of Bohemia for twenty years in the middle of...

The full extent of this project became apparent only as the work proceeded. We knew we were to clean out a disused mill and our combined team of Czech and UK volunteers spent a week clearing dirt and rubbish, which had lain undisturbed since the mill was last used in 1957. There was a tragic tale as the last miller was arrested and imprisoned by th...